Pam Le has a story to tell of a mother who came to the United States at age 17, knowing no one and speaking only her native Vietnamese.

Hoa Le is the daughter of a U.S. serviceman she never met and a Vietnamese mother who died when Hoa was only eight years old. Coming to Houston through a sponsorship program, Hoa Le went about building an American life that would feature four Texas-born children. Pam is her oldest child, a daughter who beams when speaking of her mother and the work ethic and tenacity Hoa has shown since coming to the United States in 1988.

Whatever hardships she has faced in this country, Hoa said they were far less severe than what she would have dealt with in her native country.

“My kids always say, Mom, you work too hard, but it’s nothing compared to Vietnam,” said Hoa Le, who owns two thriving small businesses in Weslaco. 

At the family’s Le Pho House restaurant, mother and daughter recount how the business came to be. In an online blog, Pam details it all, starting it this way, “story time … how we started a business during quarantine.”

Finding A Way

“Mom, what are we going to do?”

It was early 2020 and Pam Le had lost her job in Dallas through no fault of her own. Back home in Weslaco, her mother’s nail salon business was shut down due to local government mandates. 

“It was a dark space we were living through,” Pam said. “It was when COVID was coming in and no one knew what it was or how long it would last.”

In the meantime, she said, “bills were piling up” and there was no family revenue coming in to cover expenses. It was in Dallas when her family was there to help Pam pack up her belongings when the idea of a food-oriented business was hatched. What if her mother whose cooking of dishes from her native country was renowned among family and friends cooked up meals for sale? Pam got on social media to give the notion a test run and received a positive reaction to the idea.

“I’ll cook and you do everything else,” Hoa Le recalls telling her daughter.

And so, the start to having a restaurant began in mid-April 2020. The launch was Hoa cooking up large volumes of Vietnamese dishes, especially pho soup, which includes broth, rice noodles, herbs and meat or chicken. It’s a staple in Vietnam and Weslaco, Texas took it to it as well. Long lines of motorists formed to pick up orders, queuing up in the large parking lot of a building supply store adjacent to Expressway 83.

Every family member had a role. Mom the cook, with one daughter taking down orders and packing them up, Pam did the marketing and helped with deliveries.  Everyone in the tight-knit group did what was necessary to support the matriarch of the family.

“Mom, she’s a superwoman, she does all the cooking and we would help if she let us,” Pam wrote in her blog.

Finding A Home

Pam Le takes out her cell phone to show videos of those spring months in 2020 when motorists lined up to pick up orders of her mother’s Vietnamese dishes. 

The volume of customers got so large that the building supply store told them to leave. Pam and family relocated to another parking lot area near a barbecue restaurant. The number of customers only grew and to such an extent that the Le family was again asked to leave. Meanwhile, some customers began showing up at the Le home in Weslaco, pleading for Hoa to make her soup to help ill family members.

The previous concerns of “how are we going to make money?” as Pam put it, were being alleviated, but now what where they going to do with all of the customer demand they had created?

Opening a restaurant was an obvious answer, but operating such a business is something the Le family had never contemplated. It became a necessity as the family moved from one large parking lot to another to serve customers picking up orders. In September 2020, a home for the business was secured when Le Pho House opened on Westgate Drive in Weslaco, serving just takeout orders. The restaurant, which is co-owned by Pam and her mother, opened for dine-in business in early December 2020. By spring of the following year Le Pho House began having sell-out days. Bigger pots were ordered to cook larger volumes and sell-out days continued.

Now four years later, the business has settled into a nice groove. Hoa Le has continued with her nail salon business as well. Hoa has received a local chamber of commerce award for being a “Rising Star’ in Weslaco. She also received a small business state award and was given the honor at a banquet on South Padre Island. 

“She feels a sense of freedom,” Pam said of her mother. “She has accomplished so much and she just keeps going.”

Looking back at the challenges overcome, Hoa said, “I feel proud. It has been a rough life sometimes, but I have four great kids, and I keep working to pay my bills.”